Born in Ontario, California, and raised in Thousand Oaks, Joey Scarbury grew up as an American pop and soft rock singer-songwriter whose signature moment arrived with the 1981 release “Theme from the Greatest American Hero (Believe It or Not).” His mother urged him to chase a life in music, and the gifted youngster began sharpening his vocal skills early on before Jimmy Webb’s father discovered him. In 1968 Scarbury recorded his debut single, a version of Webb’s “She Never Smiles Anymore,” then spent the next thirteen years cutting tracks for a string of different labels while contributing background vocals on sessions for Loretta Lynn. Mike Post frequently presided over those Lynn dates and would later emerge as one of television’s busiest composers. When Post recruited Scarbury in 1981 to perform the theme for the superhero comedy-drama series The Greatest American Hero, the resulting Elektra single—also featured on an album of the same title—climbed to number two and settled into years of steady soft-rock and pop airplay. Although “When She Dances” gave him another modest chart entry later that same year, Scarbury’s mainstream visibility proved short-lived. He kept collaborating with Post into the second half of the 1980s and, in 1990, shared songwriting credit on the Oak Ridge Boys’ chart-topping hit “No Matter How High.”
